Why is this not true in other professions? Why don't hospitals give preference to surgeons who like to dissect frogs in their spare time or build better scalpels on their garage workbench?

I know you are being rhetorical but to those that don't know it's because surgeons have a proper profession that protects surgeons from management/lobbyists/politicians etc bossing them around.

Software developers don't have such protection and any mention of such a thing will get you blackballed within the industry by employers and ostracized by peers as most have bought in to the narrative that cooperating is bad for the individual.

However, my SO is a physician and they spend A LOT of time on skill mastery beyond med school and residency, however, their keeper is their profession, not their employer which is a major difference.

> However, my SO is a physician and they spend A LOT of time on skill mastery beyond med school and residency, however, their keeper is their profession, not their employer which is a major difference.

I spend a lot of time outside my job on skill mastery as well. I do not do it in ways or domains that translate into pretty Github portfolios.

I think average surgeon's skills are probably pretty sharp (pun intended), however, in my experience the knowledge of a regular small-town GP's indeed usually is not very up-to-date.

Regarding the OP's question: new hip languages and frameworks evolve way faster than human body, and "it works" is more important in medicine than "iterate and fail fast" (hopefully:)

My personal theory is also that partially the high expectations are due to open source / hacker ethos (there's generally no medical open source movement, or in any profession outside of IT AFAIK, at least on such scale). The cycle goes like this:

- some folks want to do something cool for fun and/or to get some fame for showing it to the public, or get famous for inventing a known lib/framework

- companies see they're smart and hire them

- other companies follow the trend, and require open source contributions or at least building space shuttle over the weekend

- a number of devs don't want to lag behind, so they join the bandwagon, and they create even more cool stuff and even more open source MVC frameworks

- now, the cycle reinforces itself, everyone is doing cool stuff and contributing to opensource, if you don't, you're excluded

edit: fixed typos

I don't think software is all that exceptional in this regard. Any profession has certain visible achievements that distinguish its world-class members. For software, it's cool open source projects; for chefs, it's creating a great restaurant; for doctors, it's publishing influential novel research.

In each of these fields, the visible achievement isn't exactly the same as great performance in the field. You can get unlucky in scientific research and end up with nothing publishable; you can cook mediocre food but market it really well; or you can create the latest trendy build system instead of just mastering Gnu Make.

The misleading thing may be the assumption that most successful open source software projects are done by unpaid hackers on their own time. Perhaps that used to be the case, but many of the hot open source projects in recent history -- from Rails to Docker to React to Swift -- are built on the clock by successful programmers employed at big and small companies. But software is unusual in that serious contributions can be made by people without any institutional support.

Good point. This is possible for surgeons because medicine is a stricter hierarchy of professions that software: you decide to become a surgeon or a nurse or a PA early in your career, compete for that privilege, and don't change. Advanced specialist doctors often work in teaching hospitals and devote a large chunk of their time to research; at lower-level medical professions, you might get continuing education credits. These tiers are well established over many years in the industry and the schools that train the next generations of participants.

I'd say that top achievers in the software industry can also command similar benefits, but the mechanism is different. Instead of leveraging a credential into research and leveraging cool research stories into grant funding, software people get to do what they want by leveraging hard work, luck, and great stories about what they can do into great jobs or investor dollars. There are pros and cons to each system, but one big virtue of the less structured software world is that it tends to respond to market opportunity a lot more efficiently than something like medicine.

Doctors are already required to perform continuing education beyond their normal work duties (ie still meet their quotas). These requirements have actually been getting more and more onerous over the years. My mother works in primary care, and the house always has medical related magazines and journals all over the place.

So if you are in medicine, you are required to at least go through the motions of keeping up on things.

Because surgeons are already workaholics with insane work/life balance issues, perhaps? Same for many other professions.

What? Doctors have to do a crazy amount of education in off-work hours.

I find my singleness/childlessness to be a MAJOR strategic advantage in the modern workplace. Because I can travel more and take on clients outside of the HQ area, I provide a value that other people can't. Still moved into management, but I can also stay on top of new technologies and remain agile.